Immigration and Ideas: What Did Russian Scientists "Bring" to the United States?

Ina Ganguli

Journal of Labor Economics, 2015, vol. 33, issue S1, S257 - S288

Abstract: This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich data set of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the United States, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field-specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to "spill over" to natives.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/679741 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/679741 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Chapter: Immigration and Ideas: What Did Russian Scientists "Bring" to the United States? (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/679741

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().